observations from the pop-culture id
Self-immolating vampires are stupid.
An Emerging Medium
Michael Abbott muses on the cultural relevance of games:
Film studies programs proliferate at colleges and universities while many of us continue to plead the case for teaching even a single course devoted to video games. And as popular culture fetes go, well, there’s the Oscars and the Golden Globes; the Grammys and the Pulitzers…and there’s the Spike TV Video Game Awards.
I say these cultural barometers are mostly irrelevant. They measure and reward factors with few analogs in games, and they rely on formulaic ways of knowing that increasingly seem irrelevant to understanding games. Aristotle’s Poetics – still the blueprint for framing our understanding of literature, drama, film, and television – has served us well for 2300 years, but dramatic theory cannot adequately account for the structural or experiential nature of games. Roger Ebert may be the elder statesman of American film critics, but applying film theory to games is an effort that fails before it begins. Even market validation is problematic. It’s easy to count how many people buy movie movie tickets, but unit sales don’t always paint an accurate picture for games, especially for social titles shared by friends and family over months and even years.
We who love games wait and wonder, but what are we waiting for? To be taken seriously? To be highly regarded? To have our place at the table? I’m not suggesting we’re wasting our time making the case for games. I spend an inordinate amount of time doing just that with my academic colleagues. But if the door to cultural affirmation suddenly opened, what would we gain by walking through it? How would our efforts to evolve and grow change? Might we, upon reflection, decide that an “emerging medium” is actually quite a fine thing to be?
the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy
It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all.
With a little historical perspective.
In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”
Better yet.
When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. “What’s the matter, madam?” he asked. “What can I do for you?” The woman responded with self-righteous fury: “Well, if you don’t know I can’t help you.”
Tom DeLay Joins ‘Dancing with the Stars’
Roommates – Episode 1
(via swissmiss)
Band Name
The Confounding Mothers.
You have to be kidding me.
I don’t begrudge people making good money, but “squeaking by on $300,000” is undoubtedly a ridiculous statement.
Yet for all of the lives shaken, few are willing to talk about it. More than three-dozen people interviewed for this article would not allow their names or identifying details to be used.
Laura Steins doesn’t mind saying that she is barely squeaking by on $300,000 a year. She lives in a place where the boom years of Wall Street pushed the standard of living to astonishing heights. Where fifth-graders shop at a store called Lester’s that sells $114 tween-size True Religion jeans. Where a cup of fresh spinach and carrot juice called the Iron Maiden costs $7.95.
By local standards, Steins occupies the lower rung of affluence — the rung where every dollar now matters.
A horse is a horse of course of course
Unless he’s involved in something like this. This is the Naturmobil, an idea for future eco travel by Iranian engineer Hadi Mirhejazi, which, according to the Guardian,
combines 19th-century travel with 21st-century gym equipment.
You fire the treadmill up, the horse gets going, this charges the battery, there are gears involved, and away everybody goes at 28 miles an hour in perspex. How’dya like them apples, Deron? I’ll bet you’re feeling a bit silly about all your badger-guarding Ferrari love now, ain’tcha?
dear clusterflock
Who is watching Mad Men tonight?
Bolt! 100 Meters 9.58
Anybody here see this race? I did, and I’m glad I recorded it. It’s a thing of beauty.
I wonder when the controversy will kick in concerning how, exactly, a person could not only become the first to break 9.7, but also the first person to break 9.6. I sure hope it’s all due to super ability, as I think it is. The man strikes me as honest and open and capable of great joy. A good thing to see in any sport.
A Letter to Merce | Bill T. Jones
I thank you for your prodigious output and the simple truth, which could be a question, a text message from you to me, which asks:
“What will you do now?
What is worth doing and how?”Thank you, Merce.
Goodbye,
Bill T. Jones
Just about a month from now — September 17 — we will have the premiere of choreographer Bill T. Jones‘s Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray, a work commissioned by the Ravinia Festival and an Illinois Bicentennial Commission in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. (You can follow the work-in-progress here via a production diary that Jones updates frequently these days.)
Merce Cunningham’s aesthetic and his sensibility feel way over there to Bill T. Jones’s here, or so it seems to me. To Jones, too . . . and yet . . .
Read more
Two new pastels
A day later
At least we’re not Socialists
Deron: write about it.
I am being asked for 32k from the first surgeon who operated on my hand after the table saw accident. (Amy and I drove to the nearest emergency room and were presented with a surgeon not in my network.) My relationship with him is complicated by the fact that he ignored my pain for two days and used external sutures on my ringer finger (internally) that are still there. I was also told repeatedly by my insurance company that this would be taken care of, that he was paid what he was contractually obligated to receive, and that he had no business presenting me with a bill. Until they stopped saying that. Additionally, I was caused to believe that the amount he was charging was ridiculously overpriced, and incommensurate with the procedures he performed. Mix all that up. Add a pinch of uncertainty — coupled with rage — and that begins to approximate it.
There is more, of course. But that is all I can currently stomach.
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
played in Malta on August 8.
Beauty and the beast
problem solved
I mean, I — you know, yes, I mean, there are programs in place that, you know, the — the founders did not want to have here. The — you know, I know that there are people out there that can’t afford health insurance, that can’t afford a lot of different things. And, you know, with the founders, they had — they thought and hoped that the goodness of the people would allow the people to take care of those who could — who were doing without.
And I know that may seem naive in today’s world. We stayed at a friend’s house last night who is at the other end of the spectrum than what I am. And we have had political debates a million times over. And he thought, isn’t it naive, you know, to think that way? People don’t do that anymore.
And I said, not everybody, but a lot of people that I know go on missions. They-they-they volunteer.
5 Ways To Look Five Years Younger
1. Wear a diaper.
something, 30
There were songbirds up there. Some of them were able to speak. One of them, a cockatiel, was a stand-up comedian.
Let the record show
Today sucked.
David Toop
The arts, liberally
But I do find it disturbing that my entire profession can’t even define what it does. This is not a problem that doctors, janitors, or IT people have. [...]
Wisdom, on the other hand, is something wholly internal and personal, and that makes it something unalienable from the individual, something that can’t be measured in test results, dollars, leisure time, or quite possibly by any rubric at all. It might happen after spending years in a safe and moderated classroom environment studying everything from history to physics to music, or it might come from just reading philosophers from Plato to Rawls. When it comes down to it, all we can do as teachers is place students in contact with so many products of the human experience that they are as likely as not to find some small thing that makes them think, and that makes them wiser for it.
I read this, and thought of our Amanda Mae. She regularly surprises me with her wisdom and intelligence, little of which she learnt from a teacher in a classroom.
BRIAN BEATTY IS PISSED
Originally here.
“America Dies on Dunkin’”
A doctor gets fired for his radical, anti-doughnut agenda.
quote out of context
Not all the experiments worked — even Miller granted that backing Dinah Shore with bagpipes was a mistake — but his imagination and eagerness to try new approaches would inspire generations of studio innovators.
